to continue to earn a good income, and so found a lot of common ground both professionally and personally.
After some initial meetings they set up a mutually beneficial arrangement, where they shared and referred work assignments when over their personal capacity.
Eventually, after working together successfully for a few months they decided to merge their companies and set up CVA. With their increased capacity and extended skills base their client list is growing by the week.
They cite two main reasons for this success. Firstly, they started marketing their business as the financial crisis started to take its toll on the area’s businesses. People were being made redundant from large firms due to budget cuts and setting up as sole traders and small companies were cutting costs by outsourcing time-consuming office management tasks to reduce their fixed overheads.
This worked in their favour and word started to spread, particularly in the construction and service industries in the area, that CVA was offering a “pay as you go” service where clients could pay for hourly units of work or agree a bespoke arrangement for a monthly retainer fee, whereby essential office tasks are completed effectively, efficiently and confidentially, without having to pay for a full- or part-time member of staff to do them. Secondly, with that part of the business running nicely, CVA widened their network and began to outsource certain tasks to VAs with specific skills to improve